[Cthulhu_]

You got lucky; your post is why people pick Robinhood and day trading over the long-term one. It's survivorship bias. For every success story like yours, there's at least one - probably more - that lost three-quarters of what they put in.

If you're thinking of investing, apply the "strong beliefs weakly held" practice; you think you may get high returns, so look for examples to the contrary to challenge your own beliefs.

[CuriouslyC]

All investment profit is to some degree luck.

As far as short term investment goes, the market obeys certain dynamics to a first order at any rate, and by being aware of those dynamics and making statistically sound bets you can pretty much be assured of doing better than a simple buy and hold.

The people who lose their shirts don't use statistics, they buy when a stock is going up and sell when it's going down.

[mam2]

It's not luck if you make consistent returns over 4 years. "gambling" is the term people use because they don't understand the stock market

[magicnubs]

It could easily still be luck if they bought Tesla or TECL 3 years ago and that is where their 4x return came from.

Regardless, even if you have a strategy that works for now, that doesn't mean it will continue to work forever. Anyone investing that isn't an expert in a particular industry in which they trade is basically just guessing. Any insight they have will almost invariably already be priced in.

[mam2]

Ok but then your whole point is basically "things can change in life". It's true and it's a good thing to be risk adverse but it doesn't bring much to the discussion at the end of the day.

The more interesting questions is "can you actually, consistently, make money if you are good and spend a lot of time analyzing the market. In other words "can you actually have an edge on the market". From what I've seen it's so but most people don't believe it.

[ryandrake]

It's possible for someone to consistently beat the market just like it's possible for someone out of many to flip a coin heads 20 times in a row.

Everyone who says that they in particular can beat the market consistently year after year, unsurprisingly won't reveal any evidence behind their claim. It's always things like: "Oh, it can be done. Trust me! There are ways! You just don't know them and we market-beaters do! You just have to analyze harder, bro."

[mav3rick]

Trading for regular people isn't supposed to be some thrill seeking sport. Millions of dollars are spent on wall street to get "an edge". You really think you can do better ?

[marketgod]

This is the mentality that needs to be checked. All those people trade huge money they don't care about some tiny trader moving $100k per trade. So yes you can do better as you have less capital to invest.

[mav3rick]

That makes no sense ? They're not actively trying to crush individuals, they just have more resources to access information before you.

[ivanbakel]

>It's not luck if you make consistent returns over 4 years.

Sure, if your sampling was unbiased. But here, it's not - so that user might well have been lucky. How many people have failed to make those returns, or any kind of return?

There's very obvious evidence that somebody can outperform the market, even to a massive degree. From what I know, there's very little evidence that a particular person can deliberately outperform the market - and daytraders, especially, cannot do so consistently.

[dmoy]

Respectfully, 4 years is still luck. You need to maintain that for 20-30 years (or be VERY lucky and make enough in a super short time to exit the game).

[dbancajas]

you can measure how risky it was using something like Sharpe Ratio. Then you can assess how likely you are able to repeat it again. Also, kelly criterion allows you to measure risk of ruin for every bet. "making consistent returns in 4 years" does not really mean anything without additional information.